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Posts published by Henry Brewster

This is the second of two posts by Capt. Henry Brewster on the U.S. legacy in Iraq.

In January 2009, Newsweek published a cover story about what victory in Iraq really looked like. The reporter drew his conclusions largely from interviews conducted in the area of Iraq in which my battalion was operating. The article was bleak in its assessments and contained the phrase, “Iraqi good enough.”

Initially when I read it, I was incensed and upset with the defeatist tone. In rereading the article a half-dozen times at various points throughout my deployment and in the months since returning home, though, I have come to accept more of its premise. The shift for me, I suppose, is from that of an enthusiastic idealist to a reluctant realist.Read more…

President Obama marked the coming end of the combat mission in Iraq “as promised and on schedule” in a speech to veterans in Atlanta on Monday. As Mr. Obama outlined the drawdown of United States forces in Iraq and the changing nature of the engagement in Iraq from military to diplomatic, he noted that this new chapter in the conflict will get a new name. Operation Iraqi Freedom will become Operation New Dawn. The change is meant to be symbolic of the new, more tacit role the United States will play in Iraq’s evolving internal affairs.

The operational name change has also created what I suppose was an intended mind shift in me – a sense of impending finality. I now view the questions I often receive about Iraq’s successes and failures in a new light. As the Pentagon prepares to wind down the conflict that has defined my life for the past several years, I want to bring more clarity to my view of Iraq’s state for myself and for how I answer questions about the American legacy in Iraq.

For this blog, I offer a disclaimer: I am not an expert. What I offer is an overview of what I deem the milestones of American-Iraqi joint progress based on my personal experiences in the country and my reading of books and articles on the subject. It is neither exhaustive nor exclusive; I invite others who have their own expertise and experience with Iraq to add their thoughts below.

In my opinion, American progress in Iraq can be narrowed to two major accomplishments: the recreation of an Iraqi Army and national police force and the nearly complete defeat of a foreign-led insurgency within Iraq.

Many will recall the catchphrase from the early days of President George W. Bush’s second term: “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” In a sense, helping the Iraqis stand on their own became the mission of United States nd coalition forces from 2005 onward, and the most prominent manifestation of this effort came with the focus on building Iraq’s own security forces. Normally, training foreign militaries and militias falls under the purview of United States Army Special Forces, but this elite community of soldiers was simply not large enough to supply adequate military trainers for so large an operation. And so the mission became military-wide.

Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq’s military ranked in the top 10 most powerful conventional forces worldwide, but for a number of reasons, rebuilding it has proven slow and difficult. Most Iraq veterans — myself included — will tell you that the units of today’s Iraqi Army are far from perfect, but I am mostly optimistic about their capabilities. I witnessed and took part in operations that were for the most part planned and led by Iraqis. And when I worked in intelligence, I often had to admit that the Iraqis were just as good, if not better, at assessing the battle space despite all our sophisticated collection platforms. They knew the people, spoke the language, and understood the nuances.

The Iraqi Army, however, still has two major weaknesses. The first is its lack of self-sustaining logistical support. On more than one occasion, my platoon and I had to offer our counterparts fuel or water to get them to acquiesce to conducting a joint patrol. The supply chains improved during my time there, but often they were slow or corrupted by various echelons that siphoned off some of the supply. The second weakness is a lack of quality subordinate leadership. The Iraqi Army is commander-centric, which means that units suffer greatly in motivation and initiative when the commander is absent or on leave. The importance of subordinate leadership can be seen in the United States military, where junior noncommissioned and commissioned officers have been cultivated in a culture that rewards enterprise and risk-taking. I found that it was like pulling teeth to get an Iraqi captain or lieutenant to make his own decision during an operation when radio communication with his commander had failed.

Given all this, one of the so-called paradoxes of counterinsurgency outlined in the Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual states, “The host nation security force doing something tolerably is often better than us doing it well.” I saw my share of ineptitude and laziness, but I also witnessed real cunning and military prowess on more than one occasion.

This strength and potential gives me the greatest hope for Iraq’s future, but it also gives me pause. Until recently, Iraq’s security forces were almost the sole receivers of American support within the government of Iraq. As a result, the military’s operational capability is significantly more advanced relative to many of the other Iraqi government agencies. I fear that the United States’ efforts may have set the stage for a military coup a few years down the road, and I do not have high hopes for a benevolent ruling regime in such a case.

Success in building Iraq’s security forces has in large part helped create what I deem the second joint achievement. There is no longer a coherent insurgency in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney made the infamous connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda in the 2003 run-up to the invasion. We now know that even though the connection did not exist at that time, it became all too real later.

Al Qaeda saw an opportunity to bleed another superpower dry on the world stage, and it exported its brand of insurgency to Iraq complete with many of its hardened Afghan foreign fighters. The foreign fighters provided valuable leadership capable of cultivating violent dissidents from the disenfranchised Sunni population. The organization was responsible for some of the most horrific attacks in the dark days of 2006 and 2007, including the capture and killing of several American service members on what would eventually become the southern edge of my battalion’s battle space. In what for many was a painfully slow process, the United States military figured out and implemented an effective counterinsurgency campaign. We worked to protect civilian populations, built the internal security forces and hunted terrorist cells — from the trigger pullers and bomb makers to the financiers and leaders — thus devastating the insurgent efforts.

Al Qaeda and other Sunni extremist factions are still able to execute large-scale bombings in Baghdad from time to time, but the attacks often prove counterproductive to the insurgents’ cause. Al Qaeda in Iraq now lacks the wherewithal to exploit the attacks with a coordinated, follow-up propaganda campaign, and the carnage now tends to send the country into mourning rather than a sectarian-fueled bloodbath like the one following the 2006 bombing of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra. But most important, many Iraqis damn the insurgents for the unnecessary loss of innocent Muslim lives, and this causes their leaders to strengthen their resolve to rid the country of their presence.

The establishment of Iraq’s internal security forces and the defeat of Al Qaeda and its offshoots are certainly not the sum total of the last seven years of work. There has been a coordinated effort on the part of several American agencies — the Departments of State, Justice, Agriculture and Treasury — to build the many facets of effective governance. However, the work of all these civilian agencies could not have even begun without the establishment of security.

Despite my tentatively optimistic outlook, there are still some significant hurdles with which the government and people of Iraq must contend. The Iraq of the future will not be a perfect bastion of democracy, but with continued work, it will be a country capable of reaching legislative consensus, defending its borders, protecting its populace from myriad internal threats, and eventually allocating its oil revenue toward desperately needed infrastructure investment.

The question that follows the one about progress thus far is one about the future role of the United States in Iraq. I will address this aspect in my next posting.

Henry Brewster is a captain in the United States Army stationed at Fort Riley, Kan. Captain Brewster, a native of Youngstown, Ohio, recently returned from a one-year tour in Iraq. The views expressed in this blog are those of the author, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense or the United States government. If you have recently served in Iraq or Afghanistan or are an active-duty service member and would like to submit a post, please e-mail us at AtWar@nytimes.com.

When I opened my news feed Monday morning and saw the reports of the tens of thousands of leaked military documents, my reaction was likely similar to those that played out the world over — shock, curiosity, contempt for the source. As I read more, I was relieved to see that the leaks did not seem to include anything too sensitive or too earth-shattering.

I began to see the leak as a type of opportunity. To be sure, I think it condemnable that a U.S. soldier, entrusted as a guardian of the intelligence community’s secrets, may be the source of the leak and took it upon himself to release classified information. But there is nothing to be done to stem the tide of the prolific Internet commentary of the last 36 hours. The leak does, however, represent an unprecedented glimpse into the world of intelligence work for many Americans.

Taken as a whole, the nearly 92,000 leaked documents represent most or perhaps even all of the HUMINT — intelligence derived from human sources — for a number of years in Afghanistan. No one intelligence analyst would have responsibility for an entire theater of war’s reporting, but working as an intelligence officer in a sizable area of operations in Iraq, I would read up to two dozen of these reports a day. Add to this the reports from more sophisticated collection methods, and the amount of raw data that intelligence personnel must review and digest is staggering.

The situation is both a blessing and a curse. By casting as wide a net as possible, U.S. intelligence hopes to set itself up to be as predictive as possible about upcoming events and trends. Conversely, the job can border on the mundane and tedious. A few weeks ago, I was listening to an interview with Susan Hasler, a former C.I.A. analyst turned novelist, on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” She described her work with the agency in about as apt an analogy as I have heard:

It’s like somebody’s pouring boxes of puzzle pieces from a jigsaw puzzle, and they’re pouring continuously and you don’t have the picture to go by and one piece might belong to this puzzle, it might belong to another puzzle. There are many things that are irrelevant to that attack that’s coming up, but you don’t know they’re irrelevant, so you waste time going down rabbit holes.

The leak gives the layman an opportunity to see some of the thousands of puzzle pieces — albeit all at once rather than piecemeal over time. Readers should begin to appreciate the complexity of building a coherent and plausible story from myriad sources. It is a skill set that takes years of training and experience to acquire. While I do not excuse the intelligence failures that led up to the Iraq invasion or to the Sept. 11 attacks, I hope others will begin to realize that intelligence work is only ever clear-cut in hindsight.

The fallout from the leak has been interesting to watch, but many experts have already flooded the Web with their interpretations of the strategic implications of this leak. I doubt I have anything new to add to that side of the debate. However, the fact is that the leak does not, so far as I can tell, seem to include too much high-level reporting. Analysts from the various three-letter agencies supporting intelligence in Afghanistan would likely never see the vast majority of this reporting. Rather, this is the data used by hundreds of U.S. Army and Marine Corps battalions and brigades to paint the picture of their operating environment. As such, the real repercussions may be felt at the lowest levels.

Reliable human sources of intelligence are notoriously hard to acquire, and once established, very, very carefully safeguarded. As readers who have delved into the leaked documents may come to appreciate, classification does not necessarily exist because the information itself is so terribly important. Information is often classified primarily in order to safeguard the manner and method in which it is obtained. Someone lacking context may scoff at seemingly trivial information, but a Taliban or Qaeda leader may be able to quickly surmise the source of his internal leak by piecing together the innocuous but specific clues found in the reports. I imagine many battalion intelligence officers will find their source pools dry up overnight. Sources are notoriously skittish about their security (and often rightly so); this leak will likely squander nearly a decade’s worth of rapport-building.

A second implication has to do with the intelligence apparatus as a whole. A top secret security clearance is not something easily acquired. As the demand for a larger intelligence community to fight the global war on terror grew, however, the process of security clearance investigations became more streamlined as well. The Washington Post in its recent exposé Top Secret America reported that the number of personnel with top secret security clearances had ballooned to 854,000. It is safe to assume that the number of entry-level, secret clearances is many times that number. With Internet entities demonstrating their ability to reach out to a self-empowered, low-level military analyst, this leak may prompt a much needed look by the intelligence community at its access. It seems to me a good first investigation for Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., President Obama’s nominee for director of national intelligence, if he is confirmed.

In the end, this most recent leak gives an unfiltered, unspun account of the war in Afghanistan as recently as early 2009. There will be finger-pointing and investigations at the highest echelons of government. It is my hope that when the heads roll as a result of this leak, they will be those of incompetent bureaucrats and not of the brave Afghans who risked their lives to help the U.S. war effort and now find themselves compromised.

Henry Brewster is a captain in the United States Army stationed at Fort Riley, Kan. Captain Brewster, a native of Youngstown, Ohio, recently returned from a one-year tour in Iraq. The views expressed in this blog are those of the author, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense or the United States government.

Reports from Baghdad after a coordinated attack by Al Qaeda on May 10 were grim. The bombing was the latest in a series of large-scale attacks by Sunni extremists that began last August after a long and uneasy period of relative peace in the capital. The news of this and the previous attacks held importance for me. For nearly a year, my men and I patrolled areas fewer than ten miles from where Iraqi emergency personnel sifted through the smoldering remains.

When the news of a similar attack on Oct. 29, 2009, broke, I had been home for exactly a month after my deployment to Iraq. The timing of the October attack coincided with my trip back east to see my family and friends for the first time since returning to the United States. During my year away, I had developed several succinct, canned answers to get me through the regular gamut of inquiries about my deployment. But the bombings brought on a whole new onslaught of questions: Were American advances quickly eroding in Iraq? Were the Iraqi security forces really ready to take the lead? Would U.S. forces ever really be able to leave?

The questions reminded me that the general public is curious but ill-informed about a country and a conflict to which it still sent over 100,000 young American men and women. There are a number of reasons that have led to this. The administration has almost completely removed Iraq from the national agenda, and news reports about the war are fleeting and mostly lacking in important nuance and perspective. Add to this a still faltering world economy and a compelling legislative debate on Capitol Hill, and there seems to be few newspaper column inches left for Iraq.

This vacuum has left me and my fellow soldiers as unwitting ambassadors, explaining strategic policy and progress in Iraq to the American public. This role adds stress to the adjustments returning soldiers must make for successful reintegration into life back home. As we try to remake our lives after an extended absence, we are often asked to give our opinions and to recount our experiences in excruciating detail. And while our first-hand knowledge and perspectives constitute an important part of the narrative of this conflict, veterans should not be the primary voice speaking about Iraq. We are unable to speak fully about these issues, constrained by operational security – an important safeguard for those still serving overseas. Our job as soldiers is to carry out the mission and bring our fellow soldiers home safely. It is the job of the government and the media to explain and justify the war to the American public.

The Department of Defense needs to allow more journalistic access to the war. During the surge and under the direction of Gen. David H. Petraeus, journalists were given nearly carte blanche that led to compelling and informative reporting. Recent reports in Stars and Stripes indicate that the Pentagon has hired a public relations firm to screen carefully its embeds, thereby stifling their access. The Pentagon must recognize that the issues they chose to ignore at the cabinet level are left to be addressed by those of us at the company level.

The American media needs to revive its coverage of the conflict in a meaningful and consistent manner despite public weariness. Anthony Shadid’s articles for The New York Times are of a consistently high quality, but unfortunately this type of reporting is all too rare at this stage in the conflict. So long as service members remain in harm’s way, journalists need to remind the people of this fact.

The American public, too, needs to re-engage with one of the defining issues of the past decade. Iraq should retain a prominent place in the American collective conscience. With all the other challenges facing Americans today, Iraq need not be the singular American issue, but it needs to be among the important few. There are men, women, and families whose lives have been, quite literally, torn apart, and their sacrifices credit attention to the end.

The political and military situation in Iraq has improved greatly over the past two years. The story, however, is not over. More veterans will be returning from Iraq in the coming months. They need time to decompress, gain perspective, and talk about the day-to-day life they have missed while deployed. A consistent and meaningful treatment of the Iraq war by the government, media, and public will not only take pressure off returning soldiers but also honor their service. And for all the political clamor to do so, this may be one of the best ways to support the troops.

Henry Brewster is a captain in the U.S. Army currently serving with the 1st Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kansas. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and a native of Youngstown, Ohio.

The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the United States government. We welcome your comments. If you are an active-duty service member and would like to submit a post, please e-mail us at AtWar@nytimes.com.

A call to active duty soldiers and officers: Capt. Timothy Hsia is leaving active duty after nearly a year of being the main writer of our “A Soldier Writes” feature. We thank him for all his insightful posts and wish him the very best. At War would like to experiment with the feature, asking any active duty service member, especially those posted in Afghanistan and Iraq, to send in postings for publication. Below we are printing a piece from Capt. Henry Brewster, who sent in a post about religion and identity in Iraq.

We welcome posts that raise a topic about military life, from tactics to equipment to hardship on those left at home. The idea is more to spur discussion among readers, both in the military and out. We avoid overtly political issues, but topics like “Is counterinsurgency warfare working in Afghanistan?” would be completely appropriate.

The form has been for the writer to sketch out the pros and cons of a certain topic, in a somewhat neutral way, with some personal experience from the field if relevant. Then we open it up for comments, hoping for a vigorous discussion. Submissions should not be longer than 500 words.

Please e-mail us at AtWar@nytimes.com. We look forward to hearing from you.
— The editors of At War

From Captain Brewster:

During the last nine months of my year in Iraq, I served as a scout platoon leader commanding 30 cavalry scouts and nine snipers. Our daily missions involved protecting the populace and helping to secure those working to build the struggling economy and government. The missions were tiresome, but they created opportunities for interactions with the Iraqi people, both military and civilian.

Behind closed doors and away from our soldiers, my fellow officers and I often criticized the Iraqis. Initially, it was a way to blow off steam, but I came to realize that my religious identity fueled my complaints.

Of more than 900 men in my battalion, I was one of only two Jewish soldiers. While serving in this predominately Muslim country, Lieutenant Schwartz had opted to translate his last name from the German and go instead by Lieutenant Black. My last name, Brewster, did not pose the same problem, but I had my own difficult choice to make. Read more…

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At War is a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other conflicts in the post-9/11 era. The New York Times's award-winning team provides insight — and answers questions — about combatants on the faultlines, and civilians caught in the middle.

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